What Know More About Display Fabs And AMOLED From The Technology Guide For Rajesh Exports-Owned Elest

There is no easily available public information on who is providing the technology knowhow to Elest. However, based on various pointers, Swarajya had reported that it is likely that a company called Grantwood Technologies could be guiding them. In May 2021, in media reports like this which gave hints of the upcoming incentive scheme for display fabs, there is a mention of a study by the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA) and Grantwood Technologies. Director and chief executive officer of Grantwood Technologies G Rajeswaran (also a Professor of Practice at IIT Madras as per his LinkedIn profile), was quoted in some of the media reports as a display expert and has played a key role in the study published by ICEA. The nearly 50-page study titled "Flat Panel Displays — Creation of a Display Industry in India" is available on ICEA website, and gives an overview of flat display technologies and market in general and opportunities for India in particular. As per the report, the global display market is predicted to be about $126 billion by 2024, most of which is driven by mobile phone, followed by televisions.Flat panel displays are fabricated by the integration of its building-block technologies, namely,

a) Thin film transistor (TFT) backplane,

b) Liquid crystal display (LCD) panel or organic light emitting diode (OLED) panel frontplane and,

c) The assembly of module components.

There are several technology choices within each of these building-block categories and the combination of technology choices is selected to ensure that the display can meet or exceed the technical requirements demanded by the display-centric end product.

The active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) based displays were first demonstrated in 1999 by the combination of TFT backplanes used in TFT-LCD displays and OLED devices deposited over them. They entered mass-production in 2002 and were first commercialised in 2003 for digital still camera and mobile phone applications. The first AMOLED displays for use in TVs was developed in 2006 and introduced to the market in 2012.The assembly process for conversion of an AMOLED panel into an AMOLED module is more or less the same as shown in the figure above, except that LED backlight assembly is eliminated as the display is self-emissive. The electronics assembly to the AMOLED module is similar to that shown above, except that the display driver IC (DDI) has completely different functionality than that of the LCD display and is designed with a different architecture.

Both LCD and OLED displays are constructed on large glass substrates (‘mother glass’ or ‘MG’). Display panels are manufactured on large glass substrates in mega-scale display factories (display fabs’) in high-volume production. The capacity of each of these display fabs is measured in units of MG sheets per month (or simply referred to in units of ‘sheets per month’ or ‘SPM’).

Figure below shows the migration of glass substrate to larger sizes over the past two decades. Larger glass yields more panel count and therefore more products for sale. The display industry has thus far operated based on the principle of ‘economies-of-scale’. When the substrate size increases, the investment cost in display fabs increases but the panel count for MG substrate also increases. The industry experience is that the final product costs are lowered by the migration to larger substrate size due to the larger number of products that can be manufactured and monetised.